Posted
by
CowboyNealon Friday May 04, 2007 @05:27PM
from the timbers-be-shivered-then dept.

paulraps writes "Almost a year after a police raid on the Pirate Bay's servers, a Swedish prosecutor has announced that he intends to press charges against the individuals behind the file-sharing giant. They will be prosecuted for various breaches of copyright law, reports The Local. But a Pirate Bay spokesman was defiant, saying, 'I think they feel they have to do it. It would look bad otherwise, since they had 20 to 30 police officers involved in the raid.'"

Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Friday May 04, 2007 @11:09AM
from the guerilla-bloggers dept.

Jonas Wisser writes "The BBC is carrying the story that AACS has promised to take action against those who have posted the AACS crack online. Michael Ayers, chairperson of AACS, noted that the cracked key has now been revoked, and went on to say, 'Some people clearly think it's a First Amendment issue. There is no intent from us to interfere with people's right to discuss copy protection. We respect free speech.' The AACS website tells consumers how they can 'continue to enjoy content protected by AACS' by 'refreshing the encryption keys associated with their HD DVD and Blu-ray software players.'"

Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday March 13, 2007 @02:11PM
from the retroactive-blacklist dept.

Nurgled writes "The EFF, reportedly the only consumer rights organization to be granted membership of the Digital Video Broadcasting consortium, reports that TV and movie industry representatives have been pushing for DRM in the DVB technologies. This in itself is not entirely unexpected, but these talks have been going on in closed meetings. The EFF itself has been blocked from reporting on this until now as a condition of being allowed to attend. The proposed technologies allow rights-holders and broadcasters to severely hamper your ability to make use of broadcast television content, including the ability to retroactively blacklist any devices that consumers may already own that act in ways undesirable to the rights-holder or broadcaster. The EFF concludes that public interest and consumer rights advocates must fight back."

RulerOf writes: The AACS Decryption utility released this past December known as BackupHDDVD originally authored by Muslix64 of the Doom9 forums has received its first official DMCA Takedown Notice. It has been widely speculated that the utility itself was not an infringing piece of software due to the fact that it is merely "a textbook implementation of AACS," written with the help of documents publicly available at the AACS LA's website, and that the AACS Volume Unique Keys that the end user isn't supposed to have access to are in fact the infringing content, but it appears that such is not the case. From the thread:

"...you must input keys and then it will decrypt the encrypted content. If this is the case, than according to the language of the DMCA it does sound like it is infringing. Section 1201(a) says that it is an infringement to "circumvent a technological measure." The phrase, "circumvent a technological measure" is defined as "descramb(ling) a scrambled work or decrypt(ing) an encrypted work,... without the authority of the copyright owner." If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that.

An anonymous reader writes: LimeWire has been very quiet since it was sued by the music industry. However according to Slyck news, they have broken their silence to address several compatibility issues with Microsoft Vista. Although problems remain, this news proves they are indeed still working on the LimeWire project despite the RIAA lawsuit.

alphadogg writes: "The emergence of digital evidence means investigators now have many more ways to find out who committed a crime and how, but it also means wading through near-endless amounts of data to arrive at those answers. "I think digital evidence is more powerful than DNA evidence," Jim Christy, director of the Future Explorations unit of the Department of Defense's Cyber Crime Center,told the Black Hat audience in Washington, D.C. Wednesday. "It can answer who, what, where, why, and how; DNA can only tell you who."
[spam URL stripped]k -hat-defense-digital.html"

Philetus writes: While many politicians seem dead set on shutting down or locking off parts the Internet, is it possible that one Deep South state could provide broadband wireless access to all of its residents? That's the pledge of a new bill that was introduced in the South Carolina Statehouse this week.

From the article:"Toward that end, (Dwight) Loftis, House Speaker Bobby Harrell and others have introduced a bill, H. 3569, that would create the S.C. Wireless Technology and Communications Commission, a body tasked with implementing a statewide wireless broadband network, possibly as early as late 2008."

Is this another case of politicians getting their tubes mixed up, or is a statewide wireless network possible?

Pranjal writes: In an interview in Tuesday's edition of the Times Of India, Ballmer says piracy is having "a huge negative impact" on economic growth in India. He also cites an unnamed study indicating that 70% of all software used in the country is pirated. Reducing that number by 10% would lead to the creation of 50,000 new jobs in India, Ballmer says in the interview. InformationWeek.com has a commentary on the news item — "The concern, of course, is that a larger Microsoft presence in India would come at the expense of programming jobs in the U.S. Microsoft employees in Redmond may be hoping that India doesn't take its piracy problem too seriously — it may be the best job protection they have."

Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Wednesday February 28, 2007 @02:58PM
from the working-as-intended dept.

seriously writes "We've all heard about BitTorrent going legit this week with legal movie and TV show downloads. Ars Technica took a look at the service to see how usable it was and ran into a few snags, including not being able to download or even open the video files on some computers. However, the ones that they did manage to open varied a lot in quality. Overall, they blame DRM: 'Without knowing whether browser compatibility and dysfunctional video files are a rare occurrence or not, it's hard to say whether BitTorrent's service is a good one overall. Our initial experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, and guess what the culprit is once again? DRM. Why the DRM failed to work on 50% of our purchases is not clear, but whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable.'"